This is a short book with more interesting ideas and
more cleverly marshalled information than most long
ones. Written with magisterial ease, it ranges over
the many questions that have been raised in the last
decade or so concerning the boy actors,
cross-dressing, homoeroticism, anti-theatricalism and
the social position of women within
"patriarchy," offering fresh readings of
familiar problems. Stephen Orgel excels at asking
basic questions. One of the book's most engaging
features is its refusal to accept automatically what
has become the standard line in most recent accounts
of these issues. Is it really true, for example, that
women did not appear on the English stage during the
period? The answer is no. Not only that, women's work
was much more varied than is commonly acknowledged:
citing material from social historians, Orgel shows
that women were active members of guilds and worked
in a wide variety of trades; nor were they as
restricted in either their manners or their behavior
as standard historicist accounts, inflected by
feminist insistences, would have us believe.

Such issues are raised as part of a general argument
that ideology and social practice need to be kept
distinct, that actual behaviour was multiple, complex
and variegated and hence not subject to
generalizations about such matters as the position of
women "within patriarchy." In some
respects, Orgel makes clear, women may have been the
"Other," but in many cases "it is not
at all clear . . . who are 'us' and who are
'them'." There are "Others of many kinds in
this theatre" (12). Indeed, the distinction
between fathers and children (of either sex) was in
many circumstances more important than that between
men and women. Gender, in other words, has to be
understood in relation to other distributions of
power, whether of generation, class, nationality or
whatever. As Orgel insists more than once in the
book, in such matters context is everything
("everyone in this culture was in some respects
a woman, feminized in relation to someone"
[124]). Even on details this same interrogative
approach persists and pays off: we are reminded that,
contrary to the claims of most recent critics,
Marlowe's Edward is NOT killed by a vicious anal
rape, but is crushed to death under a table. Orgel is
also, to my knowledge, the first person to ask why
Viola takes on the name "Cesario" (he
provides a provocative answer as well) and his
exploration of why Rosalind's boy-name carries an
"inescapable allusion" to the catamite
"for whom Jove himself abandons his marriage
bed" (57) goes beyond any previous one.

Just because of the careful scrutiny Orgel gives to
accepted ideas, it is disappointing when he himself
slips into dogmatism. For example, his claim that
Antonio and Sebastian in Twelfth Night are an
"overtly homosexual couple" (51) is
oversimplified -- the word "overtly"
cutting against the careful scepticism on display in
most of the book. Since a large part of Orgel's
overall point is that male eroticism is free-flowing
and metamorphic (i.e. attaches itself to both boys
and women), and since the text provides no clear
evidence of sexual relations between Sebastian and
Antonio, such a statement seems gratuitous.
Similarly, a number of blanket claims he makes about
marriage in Shakespeare (17-18) need to be qualified.
The statement that "marriage is a dangerous
condition in Shakespeare" is just the kind of
remark that he is in other places so good at
deconstructing -- and counter-illustrations to a
number of his listed examples can easily be adduced.
In general, his specific interpretations of
Shakespeare are often tendentious, and seem less
convincing than the rest of the book. Take, for
instance, the claim that the epilogue of As You
Like It reveals that "the drama has not
represented an erotic and heterosexual reality at
all" (50). Again, in place of the shifting,
elusive eroticism he traces elsewhere in the book, he
here makes a dogmatic claim that seems untenable --
if heterosexual feeling has not been
"represented" in the play, what are we to
make of Rosalind's response to the wrestling match,
of Silvius's mooning over Phoebe, of Orlando's love
sonnets, Touchstone's pragmatic lust, or Oliver and
Celia's quiet contentment? This raises a larger
question of representation itself (the same issue
comes up around his interpretation of the ending of Merchant
later on [77]). One of the book's aims is to
complicate the relation between representation and
reality, but this is subverted by claims that
"the play (As You Like It) insists that
the wife is really a boy" (63). Of course the
play doesn't do this at all; it encourages us to
acknowledge that the actor playing the part of the
wife at the beginning of the epilogue ("It is
not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue . . .
") is "really" a boy after all, and
indeed one who withdraws from the possibility of
kissing men to make a curtsy (a gesture associated
predominantly but not exclusively with women) before
all the spectators. Shakespeare keeps the relations
more fluid than criticism, even excellent criticism,
is prone to do. And he does so by foregrounding the
issue on which the theatre is founded -- that of
"impersonation."

Though the title of Orgel's book focuses on
representation, performance and impersonation, he
doesn't really examine this issue within the
institutional arrangements and constraints of the
theatre itself (the way, say, Michael Shapiro's
recent book on theatrical cross-dressing does). This
leaves something of a gap, since the specific
question of how audiences responded to
representations, to constructed "persons",
is sometimes blurred (as I have suggested elsewhere,
the oft-cited passage from Mary Wroth's Urania
is an unreliable guide to audience reception of
cross-dressed actors). Hence the kinds of confusion
about who Rosalind "really" is. It seems
important to remember that within the fiction created
by stage representation, the normative response is a
kind of "dual consciousness" wherein belief
in the fictive reality of the personage sits side by
side with a latent awareness of the performer.
Orgel's eagerness to undermine the kinds of
distinctions made by historical critics can be
misleading when it extends to trying to erase the
distinction between performer and personage.

But at the same time, his pursuit of the conflicting
and interweaving strands of cultural impersonation is
so provocative and his development so elusive that
one follows along fascinated. There is even a teasing
quality to the strategy he adopts. He starts with the
question that preoccupied him in an earlier essay,
"Nobody's Perfect, or why did the English stage
take boys for women?" The answers, as he now
sees, are multiple and contradictory, a fact which
gives him license to follow the strands in essayistic
style. The result is a series of seductively deferred
promises -- he keeps approaching and then pulling
back from a definitive answer. The strategy works
even while he tells us at the beginning that he seeks
not "to answer a question, but to raise one; to
address an exfoliating cultural issue of which we can
give many kinds of accounts, but none sufficient to
settle the matter." Thinking about gender in
Shakespeare's culture, Orgel reminds us, inevitably
involves thinking about the same question in our own,
and hence formulating questions about early modern
constructions involves us in our own conundrums. He
illustrates this through a prefaced anecdote in which
he deftly places his own theatrical cross-dressing as
a student in the 1940s in a context that reveals the
shifting nature of gender categories. We are then
ready to be led through a round of investigations
aimed at uncovering a mass of contradictory but
illuminating evidence.

The drift in the first part of the book is towards an
understanding of "the anxieties attendant upon
the institutionalization of masculinity . . . and to
the sanctioned homoeroticism that played so large a
role in the relationships between men" (30).
Later, it is women, and especially the challenge they
pose to the categorization to which they were
subject, who take centre stage. The overall result is
an enriched awareness of the fluidity of gender
categories and roles, as illustrated, for example, by
the metamorphic slippage in sexual desire from boys
to women and back again -- this is "the other
side of the [widespread cultural] fear that love
effeminates" (42). So too the transvestite actor
is a polyvalent sign: on the one hand, he is a
conductor of cultural anxiety about powerful,
desiring women; but he also represents and enables
the potential masculinity of women, thereby helping
to empower them by showing the value of "acting
like a man" (106, 153). Indeed, femininity
itself becomes associated, in a fruitful paradox,
with man-like behaviour. Such major themes are
buttressed by a number of exemplary and thoughtful
sketches of such matters as contradictions in
anatomical theory happily accommodated by unfazed
theorists (Thomas Browne for one); the history of the
castrati; the legal status of, and cultural tolerance
for, pederasty ("the love of men for men in this
culture appears less threatening that the love of men
for women" [49]); the apprentice system within
the theatre companies and the society generally (the
relations between masters and servants cutting across
potentially erotic relations); women voters; the
fashion among the highest ladies of the land for
masculine attire and the parallel fascination for
dressing heroes as women; and finally a triptych of
biographical portraits of extraordinary women who
knew how to work the system for their advantage
(presented to counter the common view among
historical critics that women were excluded from the
public world). While much of the material here has
been gathered from secondary sources, there is no
doubt about the brilliant selectiveness of Orgel's
scholarship and the inventive uses to which he puts
it. It is, in the end, a pleasure not to be offered a
single explanation of the enigma of gender; the
book's interrogative style, thematic complexity, and
engaging deployment of historical material give us a
richer picture than any totalized account.

Responses to this piece intended
for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at EMLS@UAlberta.ca.